The Vergecast - Flip phones are so back

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

The team at Light has been working on minimalist phones for more than a decade. Its last device had a lot in common with a smartphone, but the newest model, the Light Flip, is something very different. Light CEO Kaiwei Tang explains why Light made a flip phone, how the world's opinion of smartphones is changing, and whether you can cure your tech problems with more tech. Further reading: ⁠Apple launches ‘Upgrade’ program to lease new devices⁠ ⁠Apple’s reported ‘HomePad’ may launch as early as October⁠ ⁠X Money is launching in the US starting today⁠ ⁠The Light Flip is a minimalist flip phone with a point to prove⁠ ⁠Light Phone III review: everything in moderation⁠ ⁠The high hopes of the low-tech phone⁠ ⁠There’s no perfect minimalist phone — yet⁠ ⁠Subscribe to The Verge⁠ for unlimited access to ⁠theverge.com⁠, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ⁠ad-free podcast feed⁠.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to ⁠[e-mail]⁠ or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of T9 texting. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're going to talk about minimalist phones. Specifically, the new light flip, a very cool kind of minimalist smartphone, maybe call it a dumb phone device from a company called light, that has spent more than the last decade trying to figure out how to, frankly, rescue you from your smartphone. I think the world has changed in a lot of ways that makes sense for what light has been trying to do for a long time. and I also think Light has changed in some really interesting ways. So Kai Tang, the CEO and co-founder of Light, is going to come on the show. We're going to talk about what it takes to make a great flip phone in 2026,

and why in the world you would even want to do that. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, July 28, 26. Apple just officially launched its new upgrade program, which essentially allows you to lease Apple devices. The system works like this. You pay for a device in installments. You get a MacBook Air for $25 a month.

or you pay $12 a month and you get an iPad air. After 24 months, you can either pay the rest and keep it. You can upgrade to the latest model and keep financing, or you can just return it and be done. This is all obviously happening to make it more palatable to buy new Apple Gear, which, like everything else in tech, is getting seemingly more expensive by the day.

But if you're asking me, you should buy nice things and keep them longer, not get in the habit of renting gadgets. Meanwhile, there might be a new upgrade in that program relatively soon. Bloomberg reported today that Apple is about to start a big push into the smart home and that it could launch a new smart home hub as soon as this October. It sounds like a home pod crossed with an iPad, if that makes sense. There's also a new Apple TV and a new HomePod mini coming soon,

and it seems like even the robot arm with a screen we've been hearing about might really be happening. But all of this is really based on Siri AI. If Apple's assistant is finally good, it could be a game changer. But that's a big if. And finally, X Money, the payment platform that Elon, Musk has been promising for some time, is finally rolling out to the U.S. to premium and premium plus X users. This is a big part of the whole plan to make X the everything app and has been part of the plan since Musk bought the platform formerly known as Twitter all the way back in 2022.

But I don't know, y'all. I'm not sure mixing social media and super easy money transfers is a really good idea. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That is 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, July 28th. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start, Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. All right, let's talk phones. Joining me now, Kai Tang, the CEO and co-founder of Light. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

So you and I have talked intermittently over the last, I would say, decade about what are we going to do about all of these smartphones? And I think we've come to a really fun point in that conversation that I am eager to get to. But I do just kind of want to rewind all the way back to the beginning. I was back on your Kickstarter page from 2015 looking at the original light phone. There's a video of Baby Kai explaining what you're doing. But I was struck in reading the Kickstarter page and watching the video that you didn't come into this as far as I could tell with grand theories about defeating the smartphone and addiction to technology. You were building something else, maybe something more specific. So like rewind me back a decade or so.

What were you thinking about smartphones the very first time you set out to make what became the first light phone? Almost like a reaction. I remember reaction to the observation or just the weirdness I felt when I was in public, right, watching people sitting in the park with the family on their phone, in the restaurant, everyone's swiping in Trent Station Airport. And I think at the time, my co-founder Joe Hollier and I were in this incubator that Google started for designers as well. So we had the chance to speak to a lot of VCs, really successful entrepreneur app specifically platforms. And obviously being kind of encouraged to that direction. But I remember just vividly that almost everyone's talking about the traction of how much time their users spend in the app. You know, braken about, oh, my user spent two hours in my game. That's why we could collect all this data, you know, synthesize it, and we could, you know, sell it to the highest bidder.

I mean, not in those honest words, but that's exactly what happened. Yeah. That was peak engagement, right? That was everybody's favorite metric at the time was how long can we keep you here? Yeah. That is an unalloyed good thing if we can keep you in our app. Yeah, and that's what we were doing. And the business model makes sense.

I get it. It's very efficient, which is why I met Google or Facebook, Twitter, a billion dollar company. It's very efficient. I get it. But at the same time, I was asking myself, what about me?

What about my time? All I wanted to do is just use the specific tool, like getting a direction home or getting a Uber home. Why do I have to suffer through advertisement? So I want to build a phone for myself that just have the right, just have the thing I wanted to do. And then move on. And we did a test with,

I think 20 participants at the time. that took away, we took away their smartphone, ask people to go out, you know, for a couple hours, for a day, come back and tell us how we feel. Like, almost everyone's out way. I spent two hours in the museum in MoMA. I remember seeing this. I remember talking to this guy.

Oh, I was in grocery stores. I don't have nothing to swipe. I was nervous. But then someone talked to me, and I thought we start talking about this and that. And everyone feel like they're free. They feel like they're outside of cage. They're saying, oh, this is the best hours after day, the best day after the week.

And I think that's sort of solidify this direction of we want to offer, design offer something that I would encourage people to break away from this 24-7 connection. Okay, I wanted to start there because I want to explain to you sort of my sense of the timeline since then. I want to know if the way you've experienced it, making products matches the way that I've seen it, sort of reporting on and living in this world. So I think back then, 2015, 2016, that experience you had and the way that you were feeling about technology, there were definitely people who felt that way. And I think if you sort of explained people, it was a real kind of this is water phenomenon that if you were like, look around at all of these people looking at their phones instead of

playing with their children, people would be like, oh, sure. But I don't think most people were feeling that super acutely about themselves in their day-to-day life. And then I think we got to the point where, you know, fast forward a few years we get through Cambridge Analytica. We start to experience a real tech backlash. There is the sense that I'm spending too much time on my phone. The algorithmic feeds start to come in. And I think then we get to a point where everybody kind of intellectually understands that they would like to use their smartphone less. And I think then COVID happens and throws this, makes this all weird because we all sit and

front of screens in our phones for, you know, a year because there's nothing else to do. But leaving that one aside, I think there was this sense for a long time that if you asked somebody, do you spend too much time on your smartphone? They would probably say yes. And then if you asked, are you doing anything about it and really deep down, are you interested in doing anything about it? Most people would say no. And then I think you get to the last, I don't know, 18 months and it feels like something

has flipped. That actually in a really meaningful way, maybe is a response to, the ever-encroaching algorithms, maybe as a response to AI, people are not only understanding that they want to make these changes and that they ought to make these changes and that these things are an incursion in their lives,

but are actually actively doing something about it. Is that, again, you've been selling people phones along these lines this whole time. Does my experience of this match yours, or have you seen it happen differently? No, I think it's somewhat similar. I think of a use analogy that using your smartphone is like smoking. Smoking used to be cool and indoor.

You could smoke without you want to smoke, right? No one, don't say anything about it. And it's a fun one because for a long time, nobody knew it was a problem. It was like it was not an issue. Yeah. Yeah. And then at some point, this whole society's attitude towards smoking changed. I mean, partially because education, partially because awareness.

and then the government start to find, try to find policy to change that. And people start to like, you know, like asking people to, oh, don't smoke around me and stuff like that. I think this is really similar to the trajectory of smoking okay, smoking cool, ooh, maybe not. Oh, that's not smoke. And smartphone is the same thing.

I think it's like, oh, you know, smartphone, social media, so good, very helpful network. and getting the community together. I feel horrible. Oh, you know, like it's been so much time on it. What do I do? And then, you know, now we're in this phase of what government do, what can we do, what parents do. This feels like a good segue to your new device, the light flip, which I think is frankly not the device I expected you to make.

I think the sort of march of light phone has been, and again, you and I've talked about this many times, towards this question of what is the least you need? to do in order to replace people's smartphones in a sort of meaningful way. Because I think the learning from the first phone was phone calls is not enough. You made a thing that made phone calls and people were like, well, I need a phone that does two or three other things in order for me to leave it alone. And then you give them those couple things. And they say, oh, but wouldn't it be awesome if I could do these other few things? And everybody has two things and everybody's list is different. And I've, you know, I've had this conversation with so many people trying to make these sort of minimalist devices over the years. And it's like you eventually get to the point where you

say, okay, most people in the world use WhatsApp. Let's give them WhatsApp. And then you're one small step away from just installing Android and giving people an Android phone. And so finding that line, I think is really hard. But with the Lightphone 3, I think you were getting closer. And you were, when you shipped the thing, you were still working on some of the stuff, the NFC was still coming, video chat was still coming. But you were sort of on this road to, we're going to nail this middle ground of what a minimalist smartphone is supposed to be that sort of looks and feels and operates It's like a smartphone, but is able to do some of the stuff. And then you just took a big right turn into a completely different form factor.

Tell me about that right turn. Yeah, of course. I mean, I never thought about creating or bring back to flip the phone again, to be honest with it, because that's where my career started. Is it really? I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. After graduate school, I went to design school.

After that, I was part of a broader team. And I try to bring Modula Razor to life. Wow. And I never thought about it. I'm going to be working out, designing a flip phone again. But the last two years, we just got so many people emailing us saying, oh, I love life phone. Well, sorry, bragging about ourselves.

Oh, I love what you guys trying to do. And I don't want to be seeing using a smartphone. Can you build a flip phone? I love flip phone. And I was like, maybe this is just an outline. But we keep getting those requests from. from especially young, younger than me, generations that wanted a flip phone. And I always, I mean, I keep thinking this might be just, you know, the nostalgia, retro, you know, temporary thing.

And so we're getting, keep getting those emails. So I set out to interview, I think 15 young people that use flip phone religiously. And so I started talking to them. I was like, dude, like, you know, I know you know life. And how do you feel by a flip phone? Why do you stick with flip phone? And they're like, oh, my flip phone sucked. They are ugly.

They're stupid. And there's no updates. You know, it can repair them. And I switched like five phones since like 2020, 2009. And it's, but they stick with it. I was like, you know, you know, life phone? You can get a life phone. You can get this.

Whatever the phone you want to get. Like, why stick with flip phone? And there's a couple of things. Number one, it's very affordable. You know, so they want to get a photo phone. Number two, they love the satisfaction of opening up and you could shut it down and flip down and the technology goes away.

It represents something. It's almost like a badge of honor for some people that I could flip down the technology and goes away. There's no screen. Well, some of them still have screen outside, but it goes away. It sounds so ridiculous to say that out loud, but I'm absolutely convinced there is something real to that.

I really am that there is something to saying, I am finished with my phone now and you close it. There is something in that that I think is honestly powerful. We do that all the time. We put our smartphone face down, the same idea. They love that action. And then we heard from some hardcore flip-phone users that they just don't want to be seeing using a glass, like texting on a glass. They want this phone factor.

This phone factor represents something else to them. I think it presents almost like a movement they wholeheartedly believe in. Or the opposite of all this AI everywhere, all this invasive practice or AI everything you touch. And what does that benefit me? A lot of them ask, I have that question too. What does that got to do with me? I have that question too. What's all this thing got to do with me?

I know the benefit. I know the use case. Some use cases are really helpful. But I think this generation, at least from my understanding, I don't speak for them. But my understanding, they don't, they value their own, you know, like freedom. They don't want to subscribe to the gender that technology company are pushing. You know, they value real life experience. So the implication here is that it's actually not just a sort of individual tool for not using a response to so much.

it's actually a status symbol. It's like, this is so funny because I think, again, you and I came up in the age where you, like, I remember who my last friend was to get a smartphone and we all made fun of them for still having a flip phone when everybody else said smartphone. Because it's like, oh, well, you're just, you're the loser being left behind by technology.

And you're saying that now, you know, two decades later that has come all the way back around. And actually, what you're saying is like, if you're 17, you're looking at your friends of smartphones being like, oh, you're the sheep beholden to big tech companies. I'm free. Look at my flip phone. I love that so much.

It's so ridiculous, but I love it so much. But I'm different. It's similar to how when iPhone first on the market, right, people feel when they buy this object, they feel they're a different kind of person. It represents what their belief system.

I have internet incentive with a laptop, my tablet. You know, I know I could do social media things and emails here and there. And I don't want to carry this thing 24-7. And this is something well. we've been talking about too. Like, I'm not asking people to give up technology.

We're trying to say we have different car, different shoes, different jacket, designed for different purpose, higher price, lower price, different purpose, right? When it comes to the phone the last 20 years, for some reason, it just has to be smartphone. And it all look the same anyway. iPhone, Android, app store, all the same anyway. And there's no other option. You could obviously buy a flip on 20 years ago. It's 2G, 3G, reception sucks.

No one care about it. No one's selling them. Coverage is horrendous. And there's no other option. And it's just like so unviolence. And yeah, I guess that's where we come in. Okay. So tell me about the process of designing a flip phone for 2026.

I think the phone factor, obviously, the product looks different as a flip phone. But I actually think the software, it's what those group of people already value. Meaning that the lightflip and Lyftphone 3 software user interface operating system are essentially the same. And we have a toolbox or tool library I call it, AKA App Store, a tool library that we and our community created and that has just essential tools. And that will apply to both Lightphone 3 and Live Flip. So you still have all the modern essential tools that we design as a company and the community created for Lyftphone. And those tools will follow the same principle of no advertisement, do one thing well, and no infinite feat. So the tool will continue to grow.

I want to give everyone, like we talk about, give everyone all the modern essential tools I can create. We're just slow because we're smaller. But I want to have a toolbox that has all the tools that you need and you can use that on Lightphone 3 or Light Flip. And so essentially software design are the same. It's similar with iPhone 3. That hasn't changed. But the fourth phone, we take away touch screen for the phone factors, and all the navigation settings will see the navigation pad.

Is that again because people are like, I don't want to be seen typing on glass? Like in a very real way, you're like we have to make it not look like this is a smartphone cut in half. We have to actually change the interaction system here. Well, I think, you know, there's no point touching the screen with the keypad. I'm fair. How I see this. The whole keypad, I'm a big fan of Deterime, the calculator's buttons,

and I want to recreate those buttons be so tactile, design well with the curvature, so it pressed down and travel down well. So I want to recreate those buttons with navigation pad, and with that pad, there's no point touching your screen. And you flip it down, there's a screen, you flip it up. There's no confusion of where to touch. versus the light phone 3

My light phone 3 is a glass screen It's a touch panel So it makes sense And I want the product Look visually Like you know There still has a little speaker grill

On the light flip And when you open it There's a screen And it's a key That's it So it's just honest And straightforward That's how I usually design

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I would assume it's actually in a lot of ways probably easier to build a smartphone than it is to build a flip phone in 2026. Is that true? Yeah, it is true. The caveat being, the problem being because no one is making mass-producing flip phones. So a lot of components are we need to revive them. We need to talk to suppliers to build it for the flip phone, you know, compared to a smartphone, there's a lot of common part.

So which also contribute to the cost, right? Smart phone company, it builds smartphone, a lot of common parts, a lot of suppliers, so price are lower. But if you try to make a customized phone, like LifeFirm 3 or Light Flip, your cost, it just, it's just high. It just gets, there's nothing, no way out. So give me an example. What's a hard thing inside of the light flip? Well, like a hinge, right? Who is making Hinge now?

Hinge, no one's making it. So, you know, there's still some vintage phones being built. So there's not a lot of suppliers fighting to build hinge. So suppliers are fighting to build really good display. Memory. We all know what happened there with the memory. So those are like common components, lots of supply out of their memory. And, of course, are cheaper.

And like hinge, you know, a smaller display, even smaller displays, smaller displays are hard to find. especially high resolution because, you know, all smartphone are huge and big and entertainment center, right? So all components, sourcing components, are going to be more difficult for flip-film. Yeah, it's an interesting mix of there's almost no one out there trying to do this thing

and do it in a high-end way. And I don't even necessarily mean that as a knock on other flip-phones. It's just that most of their purpose is to be... Retail. Very simple, very straightforward. forward very retro and very cheap. Right?

Like that is their job. And there aren't a lot out there trying to make this thing nice in a sort of meaningful way. Yeah, I guess that's where we come in because you could obviously buy a 20 years ago vintage flip on the show, the guard and just rebrand it and sell it. That's easy. I mean, not easy, but relatively easier. Yeah. But we want to intentionally build this device from hardware, software, replaceable battery, will stand behind the flip phone as long as we're here to repair your device.

We also, I also want to make it really affordable, which is why we launch with a $39 per month contract offer, comes with the SIM car, 1 gigabyte data, unlimited toll. So you pay $39 a month for your phone and your service plan. That's it for Lifeflit. So I want to make it accessible too. And we get all this feedback from LifeBron 3. Oh, Lifeon 3 is so expensive $6.99.

I mean, I'll argue all day about that. But, you know, I get it. On that front, actually, I think the price is one of the things that was striking to me because it feels like sort of a return to form from the original light phone. Like, again, in a certain way, I feel like you've come all the way back around too. I think you spent some time and you can confirm or deny this. but I think you spent some time trying really hard to convince people to not buy smartphones. You mentioned hopefully shipping early next year.

Tell me about life as a hardware company right now. We are deep in Ramageddon. Are you worried about this moment in trying to actually build and ship consumer devices for people? Yeah, it's pretty difficult, to be honest with you. Like the tariff implementation since last year is horrendous. Our cost is exponentially higher. You can move your factories anywhere else because there's no one making things here that's affordable.

Or we can move to a different country, but the tariff is different. And now memory, it's all being bought by data centers, AI data centers. And the supply is obviously, you know, understandable shifting the focus to supplying memory, DRAM to the AI servers. And all the consumer management,

is going to increase price because we can't buy memories, we can't buy cheap memories because they're all being used in AI centers. So I expect this price of all consumer electronic to increase in very soon. So our life is difficult, but at the same time, we've been here for 11 years. We went through COVID. We went through tariff. Now memory is another thing. And we are, we believe in what we're doing. We think I think is important that this society, we have the option like this. And so, you know, we de-risk diversify our platform. We're using a media tech platform versus Qualcomm.

LifeFunders using Qualcomm. LifeLIP, we're using media tag. They all have different memory-approved vendors so we could choose from. So, you know, we're not just, you know, limit to certain suppliers. So we try to diversify our vendor base. So at the same time, diversify a manufacturer. so we have with de-risk ourselves. And the last thing would be, the last thing would be just the our service plan bundle sales.

I'll shamelessly promoting it because it helps us de-risk that too. So the hardware sales are less sensitive to us because the value that our customers give us is not just one of hardware sales, is a continuous revenue string to support our software development and software growth in the company as well. The last few years, it's definitely difficult, but I think we've been here for for decades now. We know, we know what we're trying to do. We know, I know where we get diversified to de-risk. So, and I'm excited about life flip.

I think, you know, something like that as an option is necessary. Yeah. Okay. And then last thing, do you think there is a looming? trend in this kind of gadget. I think we've been waiting for the disintermediation of the smartphone for some time now. And there's been this trend where everybody's going and buying old Canon power shots. Wire headphones.

Yeah, wired headphones. It's a great example. But I think what we haven't seen yet is a new spin on those old devices, right? Canon has not put out the 2026 version of that power shot. People are buying old ones. Do you think we're due for a new? round of this new thinking on these kinds of old pre-smartphone gadgets because there is this real interest in them?

A single-purpose device, single-purpose object are always a thing. We just went too far on cramping everything in a piece of glass. But, you know, like, I don't know, a really good speaker, can still make the camera. I think it's less about going back in time, retro product, but it's more about this trend of designing single-purpose object, a typewriter, a camera, a phone, a chair, like when an object designed for single purpose, we as a customer, a consumer user, we filter. That's why when you pick up a cannon camera or you sit on a really well-designed chair, you feel that. And that experience are way different than try to do everything on a single piece of glass.

When you try to do that, I mean, I think some famous designers said that not me, but when you're trying to design a thing, build a thing for everyone in every purpose, nothing is special. Like this is, you don't feel anything because you play, like I said, play your piano on your phone and guitar in phone, like nothing special. I remember this commercial from Apple that's horrendous that's like, new iPads, squash all the,

all the creativity, that. All the guitar, all the pianos, all the paintings are into like new iPads. Like, dude,

that's not what I want. But yeah, I think this single purpose tool, device, product will always be there. I think we just start to realize, you know, we go in too far

and more people start to want it to experience that specialty, special feeling when you use a single purpose thing. I like it. I hope so. I have been sort of begging for you to be right for about the last four years.

Again, it feels like the cultural energy is there. There's proof in the market that there's interest in this stuff. It feels like the thing that worries me is that all of the RAM and memory shortage stuff is going to scare away a lot of potential hardware startups. But my hope is we get through this and people get through this. And on the other side there is just an explosion. of weird new gadgets. And I am very much looking forward to all of that.

Me too. All right, Kai, thank you for doing this. Keep us posted. We're going to, we'll probably have you back on when the phone actually launches and we'll just get weird about flip phone hinges here on the Vergecast. But until then, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. All right, that's it for the show.

Thanks again to Kai for being here. And thank you, as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feelings, if you have feature requests for the light flip, if you want to build some software for it, you actually can. There's a new SDK. I want to hear all of your ideas about what a device like this needs to really work, like in a big mainstream way. So get at us.

Vergecast to the verge.com is the email 866, Verge11 is the hotline. I want to hear from you about all of that and everything else. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything that we're up to here at the Verge and on the Vergecast is to subscribe to the verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage.

We've been covering the light phone for like 12 years now. And there's a lot of great stories. We had our reporter spend like a year trying to live with one of these things for a while and write about it a long time ago. Really fun story totally holds up. Go get it all. Theverge.com slash subscribe. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

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